


How the Angels Feed

by celestialskiff



Category: Mighty Boosh RPF
Genre: Eating Disorders, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-13
Updated: 2012-01-13
Packaged: 2017-10-29 11:30:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/319412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celestialskiff/pseuds/celestialskiff
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He thought about forks. The scrape of metal against teeth. Prongs sharp against lips, tongue.</i> Written in January 2008 for a prompt in Blue Boosh requesting a fic about Noel Fielding having an eating disorder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Angels Feed

**Author's Note:**

> Warning: Descriptions of an eating disorder.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction and implies nothing about the people it portrays.

“They’re giving up. There is just this clear liquid in its transparent plastic tube. No need even to swallow. This is how the angels feed. Pure.” – Jane Rogers, _Grateful_

He thought about forks. The scrape of metal against teeth. Prongs sharp against lips, tongue.

Julian looked at him tiredly and put things in his cupboards. Crackers, raisins, beans. At night, Noel shook the packets between his fingers and thought about forks inside his mouth. Breaking the skin.

How many calories in blood?

*

He slept long hours. It was cold in bed, and he put on more and more clothes. It was cold everywhere. The cold had gone all the way to his marrow, frost in his joints. He got used to stiff movements, looking at bones under skin.

Bed was the only place he could get comfortable, drawing blankets over his head, breathing in warm air. He stuck his hand into the waistbands of his clothes, revelling in the slack cloth.

*

At first he thought he was getting obsessed with food. He bought baguettes and carried them around. Smelling them. Burnt cheese, chicken, mayonnaise. He could never bring himself to put them in his mouth, to bite. He held them in his hands so long their weight seemed daunting, and then threw them away.

He fingered grapes, and pulled them off their vine. Rolled them across table, their little green bodies bouncing. Then gathered them up; threw them out the window. Watched as they bounced on the sill, smashed on the ground.

Wine gums he nearly ate. He remembered eating them as child, the headache-y pleasure of chewing them. He lined them up. They were like jewels, gleaming green, bright yellow, warm red. He imagined making jewellery from them, varnishing them, a black gem at his throat. He made patterns with them: infinity symbols, meaningless swirls. He didn’t throw them away, but left them lying around until they became sticky and covered in fuzz.

When you didn’t eat enough you were constipated all the time and your gut ached.

*

“Do you ever eat?” Julian had said, years ago.

Noel had thought about it. Answered him honestly. “If you eat all the time then you get dependent on it, you know? And then you have to keep on eating all the time, just so you can function. It’s crazy.”

Julian laughed. “Food isn’t a drug, you idiot.”

“I eat enough,” Noel had said, quietly, to himself. “I eat enough.”

*

Some piece had been lost recently. Some necessary piece that had always kept him afloat before.

He used to eat soup at his parent’s house whenever he saw them. Soup with little fragments of chicken floating in it, or a reef of lentils at the bottom. It had slid down his throat, into his marrow. Now the thought of it terrified him. He imagined the bowlfuls. They became immense in his mind, whole swimming pools of food, enough to drown in.

He didn’t visit his parents very much anymore.

There was fruit, too. He didn’t really like fruit, so sometimes it was ok. It was more like a punishment, the harsh crunch of apple against his teeth, skin sticking to the roof of his mouth. It was allowed.

He knew he’d eaten before. He must have. Even the slightest seraph was allowed a drop or two of dew. Now he bought a yoghurt, so pink and clean in its little carton, and the idea of it in his mouth was too much.

*

“You have to get up,” Julian said, standing in his bedroom.

“Can’t you knock?” Noel said. His throat was so dry it burnt.

“I did. For ages. You just don’t hear me.”

“It’s cold in here,” Noel said, very softly, around the pain in his mouth and the buzzing in his head. “So cold.”

“It’s not. The radiator’s on and you’ve got about three blankets.” Julian sat down on the edge of the bed beside Noel’s legs.

“Why do I have to get up?”

“Because it’s three in the afternoon and you were supposed to meet me at ten.”

“Was I?” Noel said. Pressed a hand to his forehead. The fingers were even colder than his face. “Fuck, was I?”

“Yeah. There’s no food in your kitchen, Noel.”

“You’ve been going through my kitchen?”

“Yeah.”

“I ate it,” Noel replied, at length.

“When, last May?”

“What do you want, Julian? I’m sorry I forgot to meet you, ok?”

“It’s not about that, Noel,” Julian said.

Noel closed his eyes. Looked at the black beneath the lids. He didn’t want to know what it was about.

*

And sometimes everything was ok again.

He dressed up, looking at himself in the mirror. Hipbones. Rib bones. Almost no superfluity of flesh and fat. There were always jeans so tight they clung to him. However small you were, there was always someone smaller, something to strive towards. He pulled these on, looking at the shape of himself in them.

It was ok. Cloak, lined in red. It made him smile. Glitter. Make-up.

Sugar hit his veins faster than any other rush. The buzzing in his head slowed down. The colours weren’t too bright any more and he could draw straight lines.

Afterwards his hands shook feverishly. He tried to exercise, to repent, to make it all go away. His limbs kept giving way under him and no matter how much he pushed he could never give enough.

He lay crumpled in his flat, on cold floor boards, feeling his breaths harsh in his chest, like there was a bird in there, beating, frantic.

*

“Noel.” Julian picked him up, face in his hair.

He stood on unsteady limbs. Curtains of blackness covered his eyes and he had to blink and blink before anything became clear. The blackness pressed close to the sides of his skull, like it was waiting to swallow him.

“Hmm,” he said, feeling Julian’s hands around his waist. He wanted to say something but he didn’t know what.

Julian made him tea. He held it and it was so hot the blood began to come back into his hands and his joints crunched like gravel. He sipped it once, nervously. It was so sweet he might have gagged, but even as he fought it, his treacherous body longed for the sugar.

“What are you doing?” Julian asked. Noel looked at him helplessly. “There’s never any milk in your fridge.”

“Why would there be?” Noel said.

Julian let out a long slow breath. “Fuck’s sake, Noel.”

“I just want it to stop,” Noel said, quietly, to the mug. “Please.”

Julian stood there, bemused, accusing, and didn’t answer.

*

He sat on the windowsill and thought about forks. Metal in his mouth. Cold glass against his skin, his cheek. His cheek, which felt so fragile, skin so frozen and so thin. Pale and papery. Blue veins like daubs of paint on the inside of his arms. Paint that he’d scrubbed and scrubbed but which would never come off.

The bird in his chest stirred, a faint flutter of feathers.

Outside the window it was grey and his lips were blue in his face. There were words he needed to say. He needed to pull himself together and tell someone something that made sense. Something that would make them all stop whispering about him, worrying.

His fingers looked like mouse bones and the sides of his hips had gone all concave. He sat, chain smoking, brown burn in his throat. He thought about lungs greasy with tar and thought that the nicotine in his veins made everything a little bit clearer.

There was an explanation. Somewhere inside him there had to be words that would make everyone see.

*

He drank alcohol, something sweet and fruity, and it swirled around inside him, better than food, better than energy.

Julian enveloped his waist with big arms and said meaningless words to him. The tones changed: harsh, soothing, inquisitive. Noel listened like he was listening to the murmur of the sea inside a shell and felt Julian’s body against his skin. It spoke with a language of its own, too, words that Noel couldn’t understand.

He felt the alcohol surging warmly in his veins, swayed his hips, tasted Julian with his chapped lips. Julian was smoke and sweat and skin, a fantastic heat beneath Noel’s cold mouse hands.

*

He threw up later, dark liquid that clogged his throat and made the inside of his mouth burn and burn. How many calories in toothpaste?

He lay in bed, a mess of cold bones and bile. The world floated serenely past, a series of shapes that didn’t make sense.

“What can I do, Noel? What can I do?”

He didn’t even register whose voice it was.

*

He twined his arms around Julian’s neck, coiling his limbs up in his lap. Julian was the only person who still made sense. Noel always remembered the feeling of Julian’s body, the contours of his chest, his stomach. The taste of cake or bacon on Julian’s lips. Julian made him feel like he wasn’t as fucked up as everyone told him he was.

“I can’t, you know. I hold it in my hands and I can’t understand how anyone puts it in their mouths. It’s so heavy. How can that go in your mouth? How can you stand to put it inside you?”

“You’re so thin, Noel,” Julian said. “Christ.”

“I don’t know,” Noel said. He didn’t know if that mattered anymore. There was no need to count calories when you had stopped swallowing. His limbs felt light, like they were made of air.

*

He shivered under all the duvets. Julian lay on the outside of the covers and put an arm around him. Noel listened to his breaths against his ear like they were a lullaby.

“It’s going to be ok,” Noel said to Julian, feeling his hand heavy on his side. “It is.”

Later there would be hospitals. Voices. Faces too bright and nameless. Liquid in his arms, so pure and so clear. It would never again be easy to swallow.

He lay beneath the covers, and Julian’s heavy limbs. He lay and he floated. Floated on limbs made of air, floated like driftwood in the tide, floated like the bird in his ribcage had finally been let free, been set soaring in the still air.


End file.
